IOM, or as it was first known, the
Provisional Intergovernmental Committee for
the Movement of Migrants from Europe (PICMME),
was born in 1951 out of the chaos and
displacement of Western Europe following the
Second World War.

Mandated to help European governments to
identify resettlement countries for the
estimated 11 million people uprooted by the
war, it arranged transport for nearly a
million migrants during the 1950s.

A succession of name changes from PICMME to
the Intergovernmental Committee for European
Migration (ICEM) in 1952, to the
Intergovernmental Committee for Migration (ICM)
in 1980 to the International Organization
for Migration (IOM) in 1989, reflects the
organization's transition over half a
century from logistics agency to migration
agency.

While IOM's history tracks the man-made and
natural disasters of the past half century -
Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Chile
1973, the Vietnamese Boat People 1975,
Kuwait 1990, Kosovo and Timor 1999, and the
Asian tsunami and Pakistan earthquake of
2004/2005 - its credo that humane and
orderly migration benefits migrants and
society has steadily gained international
acceptance.

From its roots as an operational logistics
agency, it has broadened its scope to become
the leading international agency working
with governments and civil society to
advance the understanding of migration
issues, encourage social and economic
development through migration, and uphold
the human dignity and well-being of
migrants.

The broader scope of activities has been
matched by rapid expansion from a relatively
small agency into one with an annual
operating budget of an estimated $1.4 billion and
some 9,000 staff working in over 100
countries worldwide.

As "The Migration Agency" IOM has become the
point of reference in the heated global
debate on the social, economic and political
implications of migration in the 21st
century.